As part of diagnostics and therapy planning for different diseases and especially of complex cardiological and pediatric cardiological illnesses the doctor is confronted with a plurality of image datasets from a number of different methods. Typical examples that could be mentioned here are heart ultrasound examinations, heart catheter examinations, nuclear magnetic resonance tomographies and computed tomographies and further examinations that provide information about a functional interrelationship between the organs to be examined. The plurality of the image datasets that originate as a rule from different modalities, must all be taken into account by the doctor undertaking the study to enable him to produce an overall statement.
It is evident that this work requires a high degree of care and that there should be a way of excluding errors, since in some cases this can have life-threatening results for the patient. Practice shows however that in the current prior art method errors can unfortunately not be excluded, since the plurality of individual findings obtained imposes an enormous demand on the doctor. In such cases he must identify the medically-relevant data present in the individual results and transfer it to the image information of the other modalities.
Previously the merging of the different individual results was undertaken manually by the doctor. Thus there was previously provision for image datasets to be acquired at each modality (e.g. MRT, CT, ultrasound etc.) and to be analyzed by the radiologist and/or by the pediatric cardiologist. After this analysis is concluded a medical report is generally created which can either be structured as pure text or with embedded images. The pediatric cardiologist then collects this information and analyzes this based on his or her medical expertise, generates a diagnosis and/or decides on the further course of the diagnosis or of the further treatment. The results of the imaging and the generation of the report can in this case be undertaken by medical specialized diagnosis software. In such cases the modality-specific information can be present in a three-dimensional image dataset or even in a four-dimensional image dataset (which includes a development over time and thereby a functional development).
In practice the difficulty now confronting the examining doctor is that of combining or merging the image datasets provided by the different modalities. The combining or merging of the modality-specific image datasets has previously had to be undertaken manually by the doctor. The doctor is only supported by information technology for congenital anomalies within the framework of specialized diagnosis software, for example in products such as PedHeart® and PedCath®. This software is especially suitable for investigating specific pediatric-cardiological diseases, such as a Fallot's tetralogy a transposition of the large arteries and/or uncorrected shunt vities. There is therefore a demand for a further information technology and automated support in merging image datasets from different modalities into three- and/or four-dimensional modeling of anatomical structures as part of an examination and/or diagnosis.